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Anthology of Essays tentatively titled “Figurations in Indian Film”
| Call for Papers Date: | 2009-07-09 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2009-05-08 |
| Announcement ID: |
168591 |
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Anthology of Essays tentatively titled “Figurations in Indian Film”
Editors:
Meheli Sen
DePaul University
Anustup Basu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Indian cinematic traditions have always relied on eclectic ways of figuration that combine signs and affects of desire and abomination. That is, incarnations often emerge at critical interfaces between good/bad, Indian/western, self/other, virtue/vice, myth/reality etc. Such figures are products of discontinuous assembling processes that cut through dyadic arrangements and pass the same character/body/identity through different, often contradictory moral economies and sign systems. The good, Indian wife in Yash Chopra’s Darr/Fear (1992) for instance appears as the lurid, spectacular western female body, devoid of psychobiography, in the dream sequences of the psychotic villain. One could consider the incarnations of Helen in the course of her long career: nightclub singers, gangster’s moles, smuggling operators, spies, Countesses, beauty queens, and assassins of myriad, if spurious national-cultural origins spanning from Spain to Arabia to the Far East. The ‘partitioned selves’ in the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak bore inscriptions of monumental and grotesque historical events along with epic and mythic resonances. Such many-armed, complex modes of figuration carry a special tenacity in Indian cinema for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the template of classical realist narration usually has had limited authority over its proceedings. Perpetually caught between the home and the world, between elation and agon, such cinematic entities carry in them the diverse, contending energies of the overall assembling arena of Indian modernity itself.
In this volume we will consider the idea of figuration in the broadest sense, including formations that are supra-individual, animalistic, divine, machinic etc. Please send 500 word abstracts for essays along with a short bio to Meheli Sen (msen@depaul.edu) and Anustup Basu (basu1@uiuc.edu) by July 1, 2009.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Stardom
n Political discourses and historical meanings incarnate in star bodies of Hindi film, South Indian cinema, and other regional cinemas.
n Voice and speech themselves as embodied sound images (Saigal, Meena Kumari and the women’s melodrama, Urdu lyricism).
n Star body and the body politic.
n Star body and myth
Gender and Sexuality
n Deviant genders and sexualities in Indian cinema.
n ‘Engendering’ and laughter (Tuntun, Rajendranath, ‘Soorma Bhopali’)
n Gender, sexuality and genres.
n Hysteric figures.
n New masculinities and feminities.
n Metrosexuality.
Text
n Counter-rational behaviors, excess, and the question of ‘integrated realist narration.’ That is, when ‘figures’ exceed character profiles.
n Character, figuration, and the dismembered body of the text.
n Figuration and the cinema of attractions (item numbers, blooper reels during end credits like in Dhoom, Bluffmaster, Jab We Met)
Genre
n Body genres: melodrama, horror etc.
n Genre figures and transnational styles and technologies (MTV, fashion, video games, digital technology, new media, intermedia).
n Children’s cinema and Animation.
n The Sports film.
n B and C grade cinematic bodies.
Class-Caste and other General Concerns
n Class, caste, regional and alien bodies (the Thakur, the Dehat, the Chinese in Hindi film).
n Zenophobia and cinematic bodies
n Islam.
n Terrorists and criminals.
n Bodies and religiosity.
n ‘Postmodern’ bodies.
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Meheli Sen
College of Communication
DePaul University
2320 North Kenmore Avenue
Chicago, IL 60614
Email: msen@depaul.edu
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